This week, Renewal will be publishing a series of reflections on the direction that Andy Burnham's new government could or should take. First up, Ed Wallis and Rich Bell highlight the 'progressive communitarian' thread running through Manchesterism, and propose it as the basis for a new governing philosophy.
On the eve of Andy Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street, the Times journalist and Labour chronicler Patrick Maguire summarised the social analysis which has long underpinned his politics as follows: ‘political and economic power are, by design, draining away from ordinary people in ordinary places and ever more powerless politicians are increasingly distrusted as a result’.[1] This, he suggested, is Manchesterism’s solid core. It ties together Burnham’s belief that people should have democratic control over the essentials of life rather than be left at the mercy of privatised systems; his argument that we must reform the fragmented governance structures that have hollowed out the ability of elected politicians to act; and his plans to devolve power to Mayors and local authorities so they might act on their communities’ behalf. But Maguire’s perceptive analysis, like most commentary on Burnham’s political project, overlooked a critical dimension of it: his conviction that it isn’t powerful state institutions but rather strong and solidaristic communities that are both the means and ends of true national renewal.
The deeper meaning of devolution
This aspect of Burnham’s politics has been hiding in plain sight, both in his record and in his rhetoric. In many ways, it is the ultimate destination of the political journey he has been on since leaving Westminster in 2017. If Manchesterism is, at its broadest, a project to return power and control to ordinary people, then its communitarian thread gives that project its fullest expression – one centred not on the benefits that flow indirectly from a strong state or economy, but on the deeper flourishing that comes from people being able to shape their own lives, places, and futures.
It has been woven into Burnham’s agenda for Greater Manchester most clearly through his flagship Live Well initiative. Through Live Well, the former Mayor directed millions of pounds of combined authority and NHS investment towards neighbourhood-based systems of support, enabling a community-led approach to the provision of health and employment services.
Surprisingly few column inches have been devoted to this initiative in the search for the meaning of Manchesterism. But Burnham himself has regularly ranged widely on the ideas underpinning it. Speaking in November 2024 at the annual convention of the Locality network of community organisations, Burnham reflected that ‘in my time in government, it just never at any point managed to have a proper relationship with the community, voluntary, faith, social enterprise, cooperative sector and all of its richness’.[2] Asserting that this is a ‘time to reimagine the British state, the way it works, and critically its relationship with communities’, he made the case that the ‘two principles on which a re-imagined British state should be built’ are ‘a Housing First philosophy and a Live Well philosophy’.
In practice, he suggested, this would mean public bodies engaging with community and voluntary sector organisations as ‘equal partners’; supporting them with core rather than project-based funding; and pursuing the sort of integrated and asset-based approaches to service design and delivery that place community organisations’ knowledge of their communities – their strengths, needs, and networks – at the centre of decision-making.
Burnham would elaborate substantively on his view of how the state should engage and work with communities in a strikingly bold lecture delivered to the Theos think tank in August of last year.[3] During that address, the then-Mayor juxtaposed the ‘indifference and judgement’ that people often ‘feel they receive from impersonal, top-down public services’ with the ‘direct, compassionate human interaction’ through which community organisations earn people’s trust and respond to their needs as ‘names rather than numbers’. ‘If we continue thinking in the old way – delivering everything through remote systems’, he said, ‘we're simply going to fail more and more people because we'll never establish that essential human connection.’
The programme of reform that Burnham espoused in this lecture, however, went far beyond government, Mayors, and councils simply partnering with community organisations. Rather, he used it to mount an argument that ‘we now need to rebuild the local state completely’ around ‘a new vision… one built around trust, community, faith, belief and connection.’
A defining task of politics and public leadership in the current moment, he suggested, is to nurture and revive the networks of relationships and bonds of reciprocity that allow communities to act for themselves. To create a ‘culture of encounter’ – a notion coined by Pope Francis and invoked by Burnham repeatedly during his lecture, including in its title. This would, he argued, enable ‘a fundamentally different way of governing’ centred on ‘a return to trusting people’ and giving them ‘the opportunity to solve the challenges facing their own neighbourhoods and their own lives.’ The end goal of this expansive – and distinctively moral – devolutionary vision is not merely to transfer power to more local state institutions, but to put it in the hands of local people themselves.
Indeed, Live Well is notable for its emphasis on community power. One of its central operating principles is to empower local people to shape and, where they wish to, play an active role in service provision within their neighbourhoods – building new forms of support around the knowledge, relationships, and capabilities that already exist within places. Burnham has been clear that this emphasis on participation should be understood not simply as a mechanism for making services work better, but rather as a vital source of dignity and connection. Speaking at the launch of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s Participation Playbook, which was produced as part of Live Well, he remarked that ‘the antidote to alienation is participation’.[4] This initiative should, then, be seen as reflecting an ambition to change the balance of power not only between the state and community organisations but between the state and citizens themselves.
All of this serves to underscore that while the devolution of power is, by some distance, the policy agenda with which the new Prime Minister is most closely associated, he increasingly understands it in a way that differs from the conventional Westminster view. Or, at the very least, he sees an additional dimension to it.
Moreover, this focus on empowering ordinary people arguably occupies a distinctive place within Burnham’s project – because it speaks directly to the end that his wider programme of state reform ultimately serves. By pushing beyond technocratic concerns relating to the machinery of the state and the mechanics of growth, it imbues Manchesterism with a richer sense of what national renewal is ultimately for.
In an essay published by UCL Policy Lab and the We’re Right Here campaign the month following his lecture at Theos, Burnham explored the full political significance of this far-reaching conception of devolution – contending that people ‘don’t want more promises from on high. They want to be part of something. They want to be seen, heard, and trusted’. The task before Labour, he concluded, is to build ‘a politics that feels real. A politics that says: you matter. Your voice matters. Your community matters.’[5]
Even in the first, necessarily broad-brush, address which Burnham delivered as presumptive Prime Minister at Manchester’s People’s History Museum, he spoke of ‘working much more through our community and voluntary sector at a grassroots level. Working with organisations people trust to help them – rather than going to places they fear.’[6] This remark carried clear echoes of the argument Burnham made through his Theos lecture, in which he stated that the ‘top-down, soulless, tick-box system’ that characterises much of modern public service provision ‘hammers the hope out of people’ and ‘actually makes [their] situations worse’. The countercultural nature of both statements should not be underestimated. For a leading Labour figure – let alone a candidate for leader – to make them, given Labour's longstanding valorisation of public services, speaks to Burnham's willingness to challenge some of the party's deepest assumptions about its own purpose.
Taken together, these policy initiatives, speeches, and statements of intent point towards an emerging philosophy of government. One concerned not simply with where power lies, but with rebuilding the community ties and social institutions through which ordinary people might exercise it, and with placing human relationships at the heart of public service provision.
Media reports suggest that Burnham’s programme for government will be organised around just a few big themes, but that they include both the radical expansion of devolution and ‘building a new politics’. That a focus on unleashing the inherent power of communities is, arguably, where these two themes intersect most profoundly perhaps speaks to the quiet centrality of this impulse to Manchesterism. Devolution, in this telling, is ultimately a means of changing ordinary people’s experience of and relationship with politics and power itself.
Old ideas, new settlement
This governing philosophy owes much to the co-operative tradition. It was no accident that Burnham invoked the Rochdale Pioneers – who pioneered a model of democratic, member-owned enterprise that would become the foundation of the modern co-operative movement – in his People's History Museum speech. But it also reflects a wider constellation of ideas that are increasingly being drawn together under the banner of progressive communitarianism.
These ideas have deep roots in the Labour movement. Often obscured by the big state bombast of the Webbs, there has always been a quieter strand of Labour thought that prizes mutual association, civic participation, and democratic agency over centralised state action.[7] David Marquand called its exponents ‘democratic republicans’ who were ‘the awkward squad of British democracy … They were for fellowship and dignity more than economic equality. They put their faith in the kinetic energy of ordinary citizens, and rejected the determinism that lay at the heart of the [Webbs’] democratic collectivist tradition.’[8]
So alongside the co-operative tradition, we can add the ‘guild socialism’ of GDH Cole, RH Tawney’s reframing of equality as power, and Michael Young’s community-centred politics.
Since 2010, there has been a growing sense that these communitarians’ time has come. Encouraged by Ed Miliband’s interest in ideas as leader, Labour’s first term in opposition saw a rich and distinctly communitarian revisionism of social democracy emerge. This included debates around Blue Labour, the shift to a ‘relational state’, the concept of ‘everyday democracy’, and a manifesto for the ‘foundational economy’.[9]
The second half of the decade saw these ideas move out of the seminar room and into communities themselves. Some of this place-based experimentation has been led by local government: the Co-operative Councils movement associated with Lambeth and the Wigan Deal; the community wealth building of the Preston Model; or Ealing’s efforts to rebuild its services around a driving focus on social connection[10]. Some has come out of civil society initiatives, like Big Local, Locality’s Keep it Local campaign, and Power to Change’s Empowering Places programme.[11] Some has been ‘thinking and doing’ that brings together both ideas and practice, like New Local’s Community Paradigm and Hilary Cottam’s notion of ‘radical help’.[12]
Today, a raft of policy thinkers and politicians are seeking to bring these strands decisively into the mainstream of Labour’s politics, recognising they provide a more appropriate ideological framework for the challenges of modern Britain than social democracy’s traditional reliance on the levers of the central state.
These progressive communitarians take a broad view of the institutions, relationships, and civic habits that enable people and places to flourish. They seek to democratise economic power, but also argue that many of the most pressing problems – and injustices – facing Britain are not entirely reducible to economic conditions.
Collapsing trust in institutions. Declining civic engagement. The health and strength of associational life. Atomisation and loneliness. Cultural segregation and division. Political polarisation. Fraying neighbourhoods and hollowed-out town centres. Family breakdown. Our mental health crisis. A growing sense of purposelessness and dislocation. These are, to varying extents, what the policy thinker James Plunkett has described as ‘irreducibly human’ issues.[13] They can only be overcome through strengthening the civic infrastructure that enables people to participate, contribute, and belong; by building the relationships that foster empathy, trust, and habits of mutual support; and by nurturing the intangible bonds of shared identity and belonging that anchor us in a wider web of social ties and obligations.
More than that, progressive communitarianism holds that the spaces, associations, and shared practices that bind communities together are essential for overcoming broader social problems. Drawing on a growing body of literature on social capital and infrastructure, it argues that dense community networks – and the trust, reciprocity, and shared norms they generate – are not simply by-products of a thriving society, but among the preconditions for one. Social connection is understood as a key driver of healthier lives, stronger local economies, and safe and resilient communities: a form of collective capacity that enables people to act together and address challenges that neither the state nor the market can meet alone.
Whereas classical communitarianism tends to emphasise the roles and responsibilities of families, voluntary associations, and civil society in preventing and confronting social issues, the progressive strand assigns a more active role to government. It conceives of the state as a guarantor of social justice, but understands that role not only in terms of what the state does for people, but also in terms of what it enables and supports people and communities to do for themselves. In this account, the state’s role in addressing many if not all social and economic challenges is to be an active partner, investor, and infrastructure-builder – unlocking the capacity of citizens and communities.
Indeed, one of the ways in which progressive communitarianism differs from Blue Labour – which starts from a similar premise – lies in how they understand the relationship between community renewal and the state.
Both of these intellectual and political projects are anchored in a belief that building the good society will require action to strengthen civic institutions and disperse power so that people can exercise meaningful agency in their own lives. Both also owe much to Catholic social teaching’s emphasis on subsidiarity, solidarity, and the dignity and power of human relationships (a body of thought whose well-documented influence on Burnham further points to the way in which his communitarianism has been hiding in plain sight.)
Blue Labour, however, tends to treat the erosion of civic and associational life as a consequence of deeper economic dislocation or as a matter to be addressed independently of the state through community organising and social action. Progressive communitarianism shares much of this analysis, but also situates the revitalisation of community institutions and bonds as a policy priority in its own right requiring dedicated action on the part of government institutions. Advocates of this approach have, for example, led campaigns for a Community Right to Buy – giving community organisations and groups first right of refusal when local buildings and spaces come up for a sale – and a fund to support community ownership; a Twenty First Century Social Clubs Charter; and policies to promote social mixing and reduce loneliness.
Another, more significant distinction can be located in David Klemperer’s observation that progressive communitarianism ‘sees no distinction between strong communities and an open society’, whereas Blue Labour – certainly in its post-Brexit guise – is more inclined to view cultural diversity and solidarity as irreconcilable.[14]
More generally, progressive communitarianism is less concerned with recovering a lost social order than with understanding and strengthening the forms of association through which people build belonging and solidarity in contemporary life. Its emphasis is not on restoring a particular set of inherited norms, but on expanding people’s capacity to participate, cooperate, and exercise agency within the diverse communities that exist today. Labour figures such as Lisa Nandy and Kirsty McNeill, whose politics emphasise community power and the value of civic institutions but who largely reject Blue Labour’s social conservatism, might each be viewed – to at least some extent – as progressive communitarians.
We cannot claim to know how fully Burnham has engaged with these ideas and experiments, but the governing philosophy that has found expression in Live Well clearly flows from the same intellectual current. Certainly, they arrive at the same conclusion: that the task of progressive politics is not simply to redistribute resources or deliver effective public services, but to cultivate the relationships and civic capacity that enables people to flourish both as individuals and as members of a shared community.
As we already noted, Manchesterism contains multitudes. Our argument is not that progressive communitarianism provides the only lens through which Burnham's project can or should be read, but that his insistence that enabling people to lead lives of connection and agency should be a central purpose of Labour politics is an indispensable part of that project. A core strand without which the full meaning and ambition of Manchesterism cannot be fully understood.
A communitarian coalition
It’s also true that, viewed through this prism, a number of Burnham’s recent – and rumoured – appointments take on a new coherence.
Most discussion has labelled his Chief of Staff James Purnell as Blairite. Some have framed this as a smart act of political balancing from the soft left Burnham, signalling a desire to govern across Labour’s internal factions. Others have been concerned it might represent a smoothing of Burnham’s more radical instincts that will lead to intellectual incoherence. However, we think it suggests the opposite. Rather than the Blairite caricature, Purnell has in fact been one of the leading communitarian thinkers of the past decade and a half.
It was Purnell who kickstarted the post-New Labour social democratic revisionism we describe above, through the Open Left project he led at the think tank Demos after leaving parliament. This culminated in We Mean Power, which Purnell wrote alongside Graeme Cooke, who reports suggest will lead Burnham’s Policy Unit.[15]
Through this document, Purnell and Cooke did two particularly significant things. First, they stressed the importance of ideology. Clearly one of the big critiques of Keir Starmer has been his aversion to the ‘vision thing’. But Purnell and Cooke traced New Labour’s ultimate failings to its lack of interest in developing a coherent theory of its own ultimate purpose. Ideology, they declared, ‘gives you an intellectual road map. It is vital for working out what you want to do with power, where to prioritise in government, and how to win support’.
Second, they were clear that Labour’s ideology should be communitarian. Locating their work directly in the party’s ‘strong revisionist tradition’, they drew on RH Tawney to make the case that, while equality should always be the left’s lodestar, the times demanded it should be conceived of as a broad equality of power, rather than a narrow equality of resource. Here equality is understood as an active concept, about having agency, the real power to do. This is not something the state can simply bestow on people from on high, through the social security system; it has to be realised in relationship to other people. So from this flowed a policy agenda of spreading power right across society, locating it ‘as close as possible to the people it affects’. As examples of this they flagged ‘radical experiments’, many of which have become familiar over the last decade: community-led housing, elected mayors, community economic development, participatory budgeting.
Far from reflecting the technocratic instincts often associated with Blairism, this is a politics of power that speaks directly to Manchesterism’s progressive communitarian impulse.
Similarly, the former Ministers Miatta Fahnbulleh and Josh Simons, both of whom are reported to be playing central roles in the development of Burnham’s policy platform, have also been portrayed by the media through the prism of rival Labour factions. One Politico piece even described them as ‘like chalk and cheese’.[16] Certainly, the two have real political differences. Whereas Fahnbulleh is associated with the Milibandite soft left, Simons is most commonly viewed within the party as an institutional moderniser with Blue Labour leanings. But it’s also true that they share more in common than is often recognised, including a core belief that creating lasting change means unleashing community capacity. This is evident in their joint work within government on the Pride in Place neighbourhood regeneration programme; Fahnbulleh’s avowed focus on rebuilding economic power at the community level; and Simons’ longstanding focus on civic participation and renewal (as well as his association with the Harvard scholar Danielle Allen, whose work on those issues sits within – and has helped to renew – the communitarian tradition).[17]
The influence of former Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane on Burnham’s economic agenda likewise takes on a different hue in this light. Some commentators have interpreted Haldane’s association with the incoming Prime Minister as a signal that his government may prove to be more economically orthodox than many on the left hope. Yet that reading misses what has arguably been the defining feature of Haldane's work over the past decade.
More than perhaps any British economist, he has championed the importance of community-level relationships and civic institutions in generating economic prosperity and resilience. In a 2025 lecture, he outlined how strong and diverse social networks facilitate the information flows that enable innovation and improve labour market functioning; lower transaction costs; and are associated with higher levels of investment in public goods and better educational outcomes.[18] Fostering social capital should, Haldane argued, be ‘the golden thread running through public policy’ and ‘the very machinery of government itself’.
The significance of this communitarian current, furthermore, extends beyond policy. It may also provide the intellectual coherence – and political glue – for the coalition Burnham is seeking to assemble within Labour. There has been some speculation that his administration will amount, in ideological terms, to an alliance between Labour’s soft left and Blue Labour. As we have demonstrated, progressive communitarianism and Blue Labour are distinct projects, not least in their attitudes towards multiculturalism and broader social values. Yet they also share significant intellectual and political ground, particularly in their emphasis on rebuilding civic institutions, strengthening community bonds, and restoring agency to people and places. Progressive communitarians and the soft left, meanwhile, are united in seeking to move beyond a purely technocratic conception of progressive politics and to centre democratic renewal and social flourishing within Labour’s political and policy programme. Burnham’s progressive communitarian instincts provide a basis on which politicians, advisers, and activists drawn from each of these different intellectual traditions could make common cause.
This convergence can perhaps be seen most clearly in the politics of refugee resettlement. One of the more distinctive but unsung aspects of Shabana Mahmood’s wider migration reforms is her commitment to make community sponsorship UK’s ‘main framework for refugee resettlement’.[19] Through this model, community groups and organisations are supported to play a direct role in welcoming and integrating refugees into their local area. Some have argued that this focus reflects Mahmood’s sympathy with Blue Labour politics. But the sponsorship model in fact shows how community capacity can be channelled towards explicitly progressive ends, demonstrating that collective responsibility need not come at the expense of openness or inclusion. In this sense, it points towards the sort of political and policy strategy that could command broad support from both the soft left and Blue Labour.
The prospect of such an alliance is less incongruous than it might initially seem. In a recent Compass paper, Frances Foley explored the potential for such a realignment in depth – arguing that elements of Blue Labour and the soft left, if not either tradition in its entirety, could be brought together in a common political project.[20] Foley identifies strands within both factions that share an instinct for pluralism, an attentiveness to public feeling, and a preference for a democratically negotiated conception of the common good over abstract liberal universalism. Constructive and open dialogue between these elements, she contends, could precipitate a significant intellectual and political realignment within Labour.
The real test of Manchesterism
None of this is to suggest that enacting such a project will be politically straightforward. Labour’s centre of gravity remains profoundly statist. So if Burnham’s drive to devolve power from Whitehall to city regions might sit uneasily with the broader Labour Party’s natural instincts, devolving it further still – beyond the state and into communities themselves – will almost certainly provoke deeper unease still.
Realising this vision would require Burnham to challenge one of the modern party’s most ingrained political reflexes: its default belief that social justice is advanced through the expansion of state power. Indeed, it is perhaps precisely because Labour conceives of politics almost exclusively through the prism of the state that the party has struggled to recognise and reconcile the communitarian undercurrent in its history and theory of social change with its understanding of its own story.
That will demand concerted political leadership on the new Prime Minister’s part: not simply putting progressive communitarian ideas into practice, but actively making the case for a different conception of Labour's purpose. As Burnham himself argued in his essay for UCL Policy Lab and We're Right Here, Labour must ‘rediscover communitarianism afresh as a defining but often overlooked strand of [its] tradition’. He must now take up this task.
The potential rewards of doing so would be considerable. Live Well scaled into a national model of public service reform. The promise of the Starmer administration’s Pride in Place programme fulfilled, not just as an economic regeneration initiative but as a model of statecraft. Haldane's framework for understanding social capital as the engine of economic prosperity embedded at the heart of policymaking. More sustainable public services, stronger and more resilient neighbourhoods, and a local state organised principally around relationships rather than transactions.
More to the point, if Burnham’s conviction that participation is the antidote to alienation is correct, then this is a politics that can begin to repair the rupture between people and power that Reform UK has exploited so ably. Rather than tactical policy shifts that threaten to unpick the broad coalition Labour needs to keep hold of power, it can address the conditions that have fuelled their rise in an authentic way that’s in line with the party’s traditions.
Ultimately, Live Well could amount to more than a single Greater Manchester initiative or even a wider public service programme. Rather, it may come to define in a phrase an emerging philosophy of state and community power: one in which government does not simply act for people, but works to create the conditions in which they can act together and lead full lives of purpose, belonging, and fulfilment. What could be called ‘Live Well politics’ offers a compelling answer to the deepening legitimacy crisis facing the progressive tradition: the question of how a movement committed to improving people's everyday lives can once again make that promise tangible, meaningful, and credible.
In the fullness of time, Manchesterism's unheralded progressive communitarian thread may yet prove to be its most consequential one.
Rich Bell is a policy and influencing professional specialising in issues of social capital and community power. He is director of the We’re Right Here campaign and an adviser to the Relationships Project.
Ed Wallis is director of policy and engagement at Locality, the national membership organisation for local community organisations. He was previously editorial director and senior research fellow at the Fabian Society. He writes in a personal capacity.
[1] Maguire, P, ‘Friday Notebook: Arguing with a Bin’, Patrick Maguire Syndrome Substack, 2025
[2] This speech is available to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdlEt5NHBfI
[3] This lecture is available to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzctXZ8aylI
[4] Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Shaping How We Live Well Together: A GM Participation Playbook, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, 2025; Burnham’s comments at the launch event for this document were reported on the Shared Future CIC blog - Shared Future, ‘The Greater Manchester Combined Authority Participation Playbook’, 2025, available here: https://sharedfuturecic.org.uk/the-greater-manchester-combined-authority-participation-playbook/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[5] Burnham, A, ‘Reclaiming Power Together: A Politics of Community to Renew Labour’s Purpose’, in Britain Renewed: Labour and the Communitarian Tradition, UCL Policy Lab and We’re Right Here, 2025
[6] Burnham, A, ‘Speech at the People’s History Museum, Manchester’, 29 June 2026. The full text of this speech is available here: https://www.andyburnham.org.uk/speech-29-june
[7] E, Wallis, Social Democracy Now, Fabian Society, 2025
[8] D, Marquand, Britain since 2018, W&N, 2009
[9] M, Glasman, J, Rutherfod, M, Stears, and S, White, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, Oxford London Seminars/Soundings, 2011; Cooke, G and Muir, R (eds), The Relational State, IPPR, 2012; Stears, M, Everyday Democracy, IPPR, 2011; Bentham, J et al, Manifesto for the Foundational Economy, Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, 2013
[10] More information about the Co-operative Councils Network is available here: https://www.councils.coop/about-us/; CLES and Preston City Council, How we built community wealth in Preston: Achievements and lessons, 2019; Clements, T, ‘Good Council: Ealing’s Story’, RSA Journal, 2025
[11] McCabe, A, ‘The Legacy of Big Local: History, with a Future’, Local Trust blog, 2022; More information about the Keep it Local campaign is available here: https://locality.org.uk/policy-campaigns/keep-it-local/; O’Flynn, L, Jones, N, Jackson-Harman, K and Chan, J, Five Years of Empowering Places: Evaluation Report, Power to Change, 2023
[12] Lent, A and Studdert, J, The Community Paradigm, New Local, 2021; Cottam, H, Radical Help, Virago, 2018
[13] Plunkett, J, ‘How to Govern Human: Are There Other Routes to Scale?’, James Plunkett’s Medium, 2023
[14] Klemperer, D, ‘Two David Lammys?’, Renewal: a Journal of Social Democracy, 2020; Stears, M, ‘What Blue Labour Gets Wrong’, Prospect, 2025
[15] Purnell, J and Cooke, G, We Mean Power, Demos, 2010
[16] Bloom, D, ‘Now the Labour Civil War Really Begins’, Politico Europe, 2026
[17] Plumb, N, ‘Is Miatta Fahnbulleh the Brains Behind Burnham?’, New Statesman, 2026
[18] Haldane, A, ‘Counting the Cost of Bowling Alone’, RSA, 2025
[19] Home Office, Restoring Order and Control: A Statement on the Government’s Asylum and Returns Policy, Home Office, 2025
[20] Foley, F, Soft Skills, Hard Labour: The Case for a New Soft Left/Blue Labour Politics, Compass, 2025